Gisela Mayer McIntyre - Non-Fiction Writer
During her wartime childhood in Germany Gisela Mc Intyre was praised for her essay writing at school. After migrating to Australia her interest in writing continued in Bundaberg, Queensland where she attended TAFE College, completed a U3A course in writing and joined the Writer's Club. The local paper published some of her poetry which encouraged her to continue writing. Several of her contributions were published in a column under My Say, after which she began writing short stories. After travelling extensively in Europe, Australia and the United States she now lives on the Gold Coast.
To celebrate her husband's 70th birthday Gisela self-published his family's memoirs then began to record her son's story. This book and a collection of her short stories can be located in the Canberra and Brisbane libraries - ISBN 0-646-40510-1 and 0-9578479-0-4.
Reading her father's journals, kept from the time he was fifteen until he died, Gisela began her book entitled So Many Stories To Tell with her family's history and describes traumatic events during and after World War II. The years after the war proved to be more turbulent than during the conflict. She was apprenticed to a solicitor for three years, learned shorthand and worked with an electrical company Siemens, earning a good wage, enabling her to purchase a Vespa motor scooter.
Recovering from a bad road accident, Gisela searched for pen-pals until a correspondent from Australia caught her attention, and letters from Down Under kept arriving. When the offer came to join her male pen-pal in sunny Queensland, she sailed to Australia on the Dutch ship Sibajak. The voyage took seven weeks before reaching Sydney, travelling through the Panama Canal and calling in at Tahiti on the way.
After meeting up with her faithful pen friend, they were married within three months, with the union lasting forty wonderful years. To use Gisela's words "ending only when he died."
Gisela has so many stories to tell about her wartime childhood, hardship, food shortages, air raids and evacuation, also hazardous journeys across the border between East and West Germany. Stories of love, sacrifices, adventures and travel abound in her book, with Gisela's honest, forthright nature shining through. There is so much for the reader to enjoy in Gisela's So Many Stories To Tell, Spanning Three Centuries and Three Continents. |
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